January 7th, 2009
The Gupta choice
News that Barack Obama may name Dr. Sanjay Gupta of Emory University and CNN as his Surgeon General has caused a spasm of celebrity reporting.
He’s a reporter. He’s a Tweeter. He’s a TV star.
Politicians on all sides have their doubts about him. Even some Obama fans admit to being of two minds.
Liberals cite his on-air argument with Michael Moore over the movie Sicko, conservatives his support for an obesity tax, and natural medicine advocates his ties to big pharma.
Mostly he’s a media-savvy neurosurgeon who cares about health policy. He sees himself acting as Mr. Outside to Tom Daschle’s Mr. Inside, selling Americans on health reforms we could not imagine a few years ago.
Real reform will require such a strategy.
Real reform is not something government can do alone. It requires changes for business, for the professions, for the industries, and most important for patients.
It means getting all of us to take responsibility for actions which lead to sickness, through carrots and sticks. Celebrity is a carrot, a very large one.
So why not a media figure, even a sometimes unpredictable one. Improving health care means opening up a personal conversation on the scale of 300 million people. It means listening as well as speaking.
Isn’t that what good reporters do?
As to health IT, the only thing I know for certain is that he advocates it. Whether we’re talking about EHRs, decision support, or the online communities known as Health 2.0, he has reported on it and seems to understand the issues.
So we could do worse. Couldn’t we?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 01/07/09
